Broyles: Will 3-D food printers really change how we eat? Posted: 12:00 a.m. Tuesday, March 4, 2014 Email 0Facebook 4Twitter 0ShareThis 4 BY ADDIE BROYLES - AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF South by Southwest Interactive returns this week, and the food panels look a little different than they have in recent years. Usually, we see a mix of panels that include sessions about food in new media (social media, Yelp, blogging, apps), the influence of food celebrities (Anthony Bourdain, Eddie Huang) or changing restaurant culture (food trucks, pop-up dinners), but the majority of this year’s sessions focus on food production, specifically, how we might make food in the future and how we can make more of it to feed a growing global population. +Broyles: Will 3-D food printers really change how we eat? photo 3D SYSTEMS 3-D printers can create elaborately designed foods like these geometric sugar cubes from 3D Systems’ new ChefJet machine, which will be ... Read More The interactive conference always features at least one or two panels in this area, including agritechnology and tech initiatives to help alleviate world hunger, but I’m surprised to see so many panels pushing for manipulating food even more than it already is. (You can see the full list of food panels at austin360/relishaustin.) On the first panel, “The Future of Food Processing” (5 p.m. Sunday at the Hilton), representatives from the big meat substitute companies, including Beyond Meat and Soylent, will talk about their innovations in turning plant-based materials into products that look and taste like meat and eggs. Test tube meat, a developing technology not yet commercially available, will almost surely come up again in “Future Foods: New Cuisine for a New Age” (11 a.m. Tuesday at the Radisson). This session, led by Glenn Zorpette, executive editor of IEEE Spectrum magazine, and Pablos Holman, an inventor with Intellectual Ventures, will hypothesize about an intuitive kitchen that might feature a machine that creates food specifically matched to your tastes and nutritional needs. +Broyles: Will 3-D food printers really change how we eat? photo NATURAL MACHINES Natural Machines is a company that later this year will start selling the Foodini, an at-home 3-D food printer that can ... Read More But by far the most talked about innovation in processed food in the past year has been 3-D printing of food, a niche within a niche that has two dedicated sessions at this year’s conference, one a presentation from Bonin Bough of Mondelez International, which has experimented with 3-D printing one of its most popular products: Oreos. Another session features Austin entrepreneur Levi Lalla, a local guy who has been fiddling around with 3-D printing — also called additive manufacturing — since his days at MIT. Last year, Lalla started piq Chocolates, which uses both molds and 3-D printers to make customized chocolates that customers order online (piqchocolates). +Broyles: Will 3-D food printers really change how we eat? photo DEBORAH CANNON Levi Lalla, owner of piq Chocolates in Austin, has two 3D chocolate printers. He’ll be speaking at South by Southwest Interactive ... Read More The majority of his orders are fulfilled using molds, a process that takes far less time to complete than printing and one that has been around for more than a century, giving us such treasures as Cadbury eggs and hollow chocolate bunnies. But some of the most exacting designs require one of his two 3-D printers. One uses a syringe filled with liquid chocolate, and the other uses lasers to fuse chocolate powder together. His original machine works almost like an automated pastry piping bag, squirting just the right amount of melted chocolate in the right place to build 3-D structures or write a message on a bar. +Broyles: Will 3-D food printers really change how we eat? photo DEBORAH CANNON Interlocking chocolate rings created by a 3D chocolate printer at piq Chocolates. You can make more intricate shapes with the laser printer, but its taste might surprise some chocolate lovers. “Everything has a trade off,” Lalla says. “Since you’re fusing powders together, it’s not going to taste like traditional chocolate. It has more of a consistency of a sugar cube because the powder has more surface area. You get a lot of chocolate flavor all at once, but it’s not the silky, milky, creamy chocolate experience.” And experience, Lalla has learned, is just as important to some eaters as ingesting sustenance is for others. “The two reasons why one would 3-D print food is if you need a specific shape, like a highly customized or personalized shape, or if you really need to put flavors in particular locations,” he says. “It allows you to play with the experience of eating food.” For instance, he says if you used one of the 3-D sugar printers that was one of the most buzzed about displays at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, you could make a sugar cube with alternating layers of tart, sweet and salt, or create one in a geometric shape straight out of M.C. Escher’s brain. Despite knee-jerk comparisons to the replicator in “Star Trek” in which you push a button and an item of nutritional value appears, 3-D printers require an input of physical materials that are simply layered on top of one another. “In reality, all you’re doing is changing the shape of something,” he says. Lalla isn’t the only Austinite experimenting with 3-D food printing in a big way. At SXSW Eco last fall, Anjan Contractor, a senior mechanical engineer at Systems and Materials Research Corporation in Austin, was showing off a 3-D pizza printer that he developed with a $125,000 grant from NASA. NASA is hoping to find out whether 3-D printed food is a viable option for feeding astronauts on long-term space missions, but does that mean we’ll all have 3-D printers in our kitchens in 50 or 100 years? The answer comes down to perspective, and even though the first at-home 3-D food printers will be available later this year (and cost between $1,000 and $5,000), this cook isn’t convinced the upsides outweigh the down. In the past year, I’ve seen blog posts and articles about 3-D printed sandwiches, pasta, vegan “bacon” and “chicken nuggets” and sugar cubes. My sense is that shoppers, including myself, don’t necessarily want to make dinosaur-shaped broccoli at home, especially on an expensive machine that takes a long time to make something that doesn’t really look like food. If I’m going to serve my kid such highly processed food, why wouldn’t I just buy something that comes out of the manufacturing system already in place, which can do the job at a much lower price and whose food I can heat up in fraction of the time? And besides, creative cooks and artists are already creating surprisingly intricate designs in foods with much simpler tools, such as a cookie press, fancy Bundt pan or even just the right knowledge of how to pull sugar so that it maintains its shape when cooled. Some 3-D printing advocates, such as Jeffrey Lipton, argue that one day, we’ll be able to have a printer that can tailor meals to our specific needs, as interpreted possibly by the wearables on our body, such as a FitBit, that could communicate how many calories we’ve burned that day. But like Lalla, I’m concerned that the more mechanical the food, the less appealing it will be to eat, especially to those of us who enjoy the process of cooking. “If you’re processing it so much so that it fits through a syringe, with enzyme pastes that have nutritional value like amino acids, starches and proteins, and then extruding it so it prints a power bar,” Lalla says. “I mean, I don’t want to eat that.” We already have automated cooking and food production devices at home. The microwave might be the most ubiquitous, but think about all the tasks a stand-up mixer can do (whisk eggs, grind meat, roll pasta) that once had to be done by hand. Lalla says he could see a company setting up “an army of printers on a countertop” and program them to finish product after product with little-to-no hands on input from a person. “The reality of the situation is that you need a lot of orders” to pay for all those machines and programming, he says. There are infinite 3-D printing designs and more automated food production at home is almost a certainty, Lalla, 31, says, and it’s easy to get caught up in the possibilities without looking at the big picture of how we eat and live. “If you don’t need a precise amount in a precise location, you don’t need 3-D printing. You could just as easily dump it in the middle of a cookie sheet and cook it,” he says. “You have to ask, does it matter? Are you focusing your time on the right thing?” The Statesman at SXSW Thursday: We visit the set of Robert Rodriguez’s new “From Dusk Till Dawn” TV series, which premieres at SXSW, and take a look at the narrative films in the festival. In Life & Arts. Friday: More SXSW Film, with a rundown of documentaries, plus our massive guide to SXSW Music, which starts Tuesday. In Austin360. Saturday: Look for daily pages in the Metro section starting today, with news of the day from the fests and highlights coming up. @austin360/sxsw Live coverage starts Friday, and you’ll also find all our previews and recommendations online.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 14:20:22 +0000
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